Africa World Now Project

[Note: This program originally aired in 2016]

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The June 16 1976 Uprising that began in Soweto and spread countrywide profoundly changed the sociopolitical landscape in South Africa. Of the various events that led to the uprising—the primary impetus was located in the Apartheid government’s policy that resulted in the introduction of the Bantu Education Act in 1953.

The rise of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and the formation of South African Students Organisation (SASO) raised the political consciousness of many students while others joined the wave of anti-Apartheid sentiment within the student community. When the language of Afrikaans alongside English was made the required medium of instruction in schools in 1974, black students began mobilizing themselves. On 16 June 1976 between 3000 and 10,000 students mobilized by the South African Students Movement's Action Committee supported by the BCM marched peacefully to demonstrate and protest against the government’s directive. The march was meant to culminate at a rally in Orlando Stadium.

Although their protests were peaceful, police opened fire on the students, killing many and injuring even more. Images of police flogging, firing at and arresting students were forever impressed upon our minds and stowed away in the archives of painful history as a country. Only three decades later, we bore witness to the rise of a similar student movement––the birth of #FeesMustFall.

We then look at Ethiopia with AWNP's, Mwiza Munthali.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous African and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Image: Everything Must Fall: The High Cost of Free Education, a film by Rehad Desai [Miners Shot Down, 2014; The Bushman's Secrets, 2006; How to Steal a Country, 2019]. This film was featured in Africa World Now Project's New African Film Festival, held, yearly every March, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA, Washington DC metropolitan area.

Note: This version is an update to the version aired on Feb. 26 2020. Dr. Greg Carr engaged in this discussion at the Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago on January 31, 2020.

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When thinking of history, one tends to categorize or disassociate the contextual conditions that create & propel phenomena/phenomenon that move across time and space. Events and thought are relegated to a disassociated moment, mapped on categories of time that have been redefined to fit a particular worldview---Western European historiography and historicity and its notion of modernity. The concept is strip of its promise of futurity.

I have stated before and will state again, the perspective of history that holds together the web of the past, present and future is the one presented by John Henrik Clarke.

Dr. Clarke writes: “History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be.”

It is precisely because of this, I argue that those who are interested in black history should---must---also be concerned with an Africana future. Of the many places we can start to understand the nexus of time and space, and given what this month has come to mean for many, it is appropriate and necessary to think about the: Life and Legacy of Carter G Woodson.

Today, we will explore the very ideas I just presented, with Dr. Greg Carr through a lecture he conducted earlier this year that deeply explored, in depth, the life, impact, legacy & intellectual genealogy of Carter G Woodson.

Greg Carr is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University as well as Adjunct Faculty at the Howard School of Law. He holds a Ph.D. in African American Studies from Temple University and a JD from the Ohio State University College of Law. His work has appeared in, The African American Studies Reader, Socialism and Democracy, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America and Malcolm X: A Historical Reader to name a few.

Dr. Carr is the first Vice President of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and a former member of the board of the National Council for Black Studies. Having been named Professor of the Year three times by the Howard University Student Association, the College of Arts and Sciences Student Council and the College of Arts and Sciences Honors Association, he has led or co-led student research and study programs to South Africa and Egypt.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Additional Credit: Noël Camille Gardner; See video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEiXx8pwVFw

Today, Africa World Now Project’s Executive Producer, Human Rights Activist, and International Media Journalist, Mwiza Munthali talks with Mozambican investigative journalist Estacio Valoi (@estaciosvaloi), with the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) about COVID-19 and conditions on the ground a year since cyclone Idai devastated communities in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Mozambique. Mwiza connects with Estacio who is currently in Maputo, Mozambique.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Protect our Journalist!

https://gijn.org/about/staff-member/estacio-valoi/

https://pulitzercenter.org/people/estacio-valoi

https://www.zammagazine.com/engage/the-network/568-estacio-valoi

Image: https://archief.socialhistory.org/en/collections/posters-mozambique

[Note: This program originally aired September 2016]

The evolution of Black radicalism has occurred while it has not been conscious of itself as a tradition. Its praxis, is both lived and intellectualized.

One of the most important explorations of the Black Radical Tradition was undertaken by Cedric Robinson with his work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition…

According to Robin D. G. Kelley on the importance of this work:

“It is suggested that perhaps more than any other book, Black Marxism shifts the center of radical thought and revolution from Europe to the so-called "periphery-to the colonial territories, marginalized colored people of the metropolitan centers of capital, and those Frantz Fanon identified as the "wretched of the earth." And it makes a persuasive case that the radical thought and practice which emerged in these sites of colonial and racial capitalist exploitation were produced by cultural logics and epistemologies of the oppressed as well as the specific racial and cultural forms of domination.

Yet for all of Robinson's decentering, he begins his story in Europe. While this might seem odd for a book primarily concerned with African people, it becomes clear very quickly why he must begin there, if only to remove the analytical cataracts from our eyes. This book is, after all, a critique of Western Marxism and its failure to understand the conditions and movements of Black people in Africa and the Diaspora. Robinson not only exposes the limits of historical materialism as a way of understanding Black experience but also reveals that the roots of Western racism took hold in European civilization well before the dawn of capitalism. Robinson proposed the idea that the racialization of the proletariat and the invention of whiteness began within Europe itself, long before Europe's modern encounter with African and New World labor. Such insights give the "Dark Ages" new meaning. Despite the almost axiomatic tendency in European historiography to speak of early modern working classes in national terms-English, French, and so forth-Robinson argues that the "lower orders" usually were comprised of immigrant workers from territories outside the nations in which they worked. These immigrant workers were placed at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. The Slavs and the Irish, for example, were among Europe's first "niggers," and what appears before us in nineteenth-century U.S. history as their struggle to achieve whiteness is merely the tip of an iceberg several centuries old.' Robinson not only finds racialism firmly rooted in premodern European civilization but locates the origins of capitalism there as well.

Building on the work of the Black radical sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox, Robinson directly challenges the Marxist idea that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of feudalism. Instead, Robinson explains, capitalism emerged within the feudal order and grew in fits and starts, flowering in the cultural soil of the West… Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of "racial capitalism" dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide.”

How do we understand the implications of this tradition in the context of this period of violence and resistance…how do we understand the dialectic of this exploration yet state- and sociocultural violence has been a consistent part of the daily lived experience of the African world…

Today…we will explore the Black Radical Tradition through the eyes of those who are attempting to live its praxis.

This program was produced in solidarity with communities across the Africana world such as the Fees Must Fall/Rhodes Must Fall…Black First/Land Movements in South Africa…Telema Movement in Democratic Republic of the Congo…and other points who developing their praxis in opposition to the conditions within which they lived…

Enjoy the program…

Data shows that, one (1) in five (5) of Rio de Janerio’s inhabitants reside in one of its more than 1,000 favelas. It is in these spaces where inequality and human potential is molded, identity is created, resistance is formulated.

After the abolition of slavery in 1888, favelas began to rapidly appear. Majority moved to urban areas to take part in and create informal economies, primarily due to official policies between former plantation owners and government officials who prioritized immigration of European migrants.

It is within this abbreviated history that we locate Marielle Franco, a black queer woman, mother, sociologist, socialist, human rights defender, councilwoman from the favela of Maré who was assassinated March 14, 2018. Marielle was born & raised in one of Rio’s favelas and was murdered representing her and other communities like it.

Of the many continuities that we can identify with the assassination of Marielle Franco & the efforts she fought to expose, extrapolating them to conditions and experiences around the African world, we must not forget that Marielle Franco was a part of a long tradition of freedom fighters...

In the statement, On the Imperative of Transnational Solidarity: A U.S. Black Feminist Statement on the Assassination of Marielle Franco, Professors Kia L. Caldwell, Wendi Muse, Tianna S. Paschel, Erica L. Williams, Christen A. Smith, and our very own Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, writes that: “it is important to recognize that Black Brazilians have also been speaking out and organizing against anti-black police lethality and brutality for generations. Black resistance can be traced back as far as the wars between slavery-era quilombos (maroon communities) and Portuguese military forces”.

Today, in the tradition of holding up those who contribute to freedom, in recognition of the afterlives of Marielle Franco, we explore Afro and Indigenous Womxn’s Radical Resistance in Brazil with Joênia Wapixana of the REDE party and Congresswoman for the state of Roraima in the Amazon region, and first indigenous woman ever elected to the Brazilian Congress; and Sara Alves Branco, a black Brazilian human rights lawyer advocating for the promotion of racial and gender equality, as well as legal adviser and project assistant at the black Brazilian organization Center of Studies of Labor Relations and Inequalities (CEERT).

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Sources: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/life-and-battles-marielle-franco/; https://www.leftvoice.org/tag/marielle-franco;https://www.kzoo.edu/praxis/the-life-marielle-franco/; https://nacla.org/news/2020/03/10/mariellepresente-reading-list-marielle-franco; https://newint.org/features/2020/01/24/museum-working-class; https://www.theblackscholar.org/on-the-imperative-of-transnational-solidarity-a-u-s-black-feminist-statement-on-the-assassination-of-marielle-franco/; https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2010/may/17/five-days-favela-complexo-mare; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3BRTlHFpBU; https://www.leftvoice.org/tag/marielle-franco; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10714839.2017.1298243; https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/may/04/killings-brazilian-police-human-rights-crisis-un-review; https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/JoeniaWapixana.aspx; https://library.brown.edu/create/fivecenturiesofchange/chapters/chapter-4/abolition/; https://psol50.org.br/

Place as understood in Africana deep thought and practice, is both material and nonmaterial. The seed of humanity’s ability to evolve is rooted in the practices that are intent to create a balance between this fact. Imbalance, conscious and unconsciously created have deep implications on the lived realities of every community around the globe. Being so, the remedy to imbalance can also be located in mapping Africana praxis, of resistance---of being.

The roots of current sociopolitical and cultural disorders can be traced to the processes of European projects that (re)defined the human and the justifications for the creation and maintenance of private property. There is little to debate on this fact. Racial capitalism is not a simple economic system, it is ideological and cultural; it creates, orders, and structures life systems and the polices the knowledge that are out of these systems.

Today, AWNP’s Tasneem Siddiqui (تسنيم صديقى Twitter: @DrT_Siddiqui) is in conversation with Ashanté Reese (Twitter: @AMReese07). We will have the privilege to sit and listen to the minds of deeply intelligent, action-oriented educators, think through black geographies, the right to food, memories of resistance and the role of land in the scope and range of Africana freedom.

Ashanté Reese (Web: http://www.mamboanthro.com/) is assistant professor in the department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at University of Maryland-Baltimore County. Ashanté earned her bachelor’s in history with a minor in African American studies from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. After graduating she taught middle school at Coretta Scott King Leadership Academy. She later went on to earn a master’s in public Anthropology at American University and a PhD in Anthropology, specializing in race, gender, and social justice. Her work is situated around Black geographies, specifically, the ways Black people produce and navigate spaces and places in the context of anti-Blackness. While she is interested in and committed to documenting the ways anti-Blackness constrains Black life, her ultimately is intent to seek answers to the question: what and who survives?

Including being a valued member of the AfricaNow! and AWNP multimedia educational collectives, Tasneem Siddiqui is an assistant professor in the department of history, politics, and social justice where she teaches courses that explore the ways of being, practices of resistance, and knowledge production throughout the African world.

#HBCUsWork

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Enjoy the program!

In When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, Mahmood Mamdani essentially argues that the dominant narrative of the Rwanda genocide needs to be confronted. Rather than relying upon underlying notions that attributes generic psychological irrationality or cultural stereotypes as being explanatory causes of the genocide, it must not be lost that the acute events the spurred the mass loss of human life must be contextualized in regional and historical conditions (When Victims Become Killers: 8; Book Review: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/08969205020280030805).

For Mamdani: “We may agree that genocidal violence cannot be understood as rational: yet, we need to understand it as thinkable.” (When Victims Become Killers: 8; Book Review: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/08969205020280030805)

To understand this position, we can extract a more critical understanding, at least in part, from the term ‘genocide’ itself. If described as being solely a moral totality, the socio-historical context becomes obscured. As the morality in question is carried and nourished in the cultural seed of a people. Genocide, by its very definition, refers to systematic efforts [with mental and physical elements] to destroy entire of groups of people within the juridical boundaries of a nation-state (https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml). Additionally, genocide refers to acute events that, while located within brutal and irrevocable chronology (exemplified in phrases that include: ‘Final Solution’, ‘Eradication’, ‘Extermination’, ‘Cleansing’), dominant discourse tends to dehistorize—or over historize it, depending on the group it is applied to of course. For Mamdani, understanding the Rwanda genocide as “thinkable” means accounting for regional dynamics and historical realities. As a result, by examining the formation of political identity rooted in narrowly constructed political and economic referential points created by the legal infrastructures of the state, we can begin to see how genocidal conflicts are manufactured for particular purposes.

It is here, a framework is developed that can be used to reveal how modalities of colonial rule create distinctive legacies; the subaltern identities that are constructed by colonial state-formation exemplify and moves forward the dilemmas of post-colonial citizenship.

In essence, the impact of the dialectical historical processes, between the colonial and anti-colonial, create contradictions captured in a myth of the post-colonial moment…a moment that is yet to realize that it is possible.

Today’s program was produced in anticipation of the forum that will be held on Feb 6, from 12-1:30 at the Institute for Policy Studies) which will feature todays guest, Judi Rever author of “In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front” and Claude Gatebuke, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, co-founder & Executive Director of the African Great Lakes Action Network (AGLAN).

Judi Rever is a freelance print & broadcast journalist who started her career with Radio France Internationale before working for the wire service Agence France-Presse (France Press Agency),

Claude Gatebuke is co-founder & executive director of the African Great Lakes Action Network (AGLAN) as well as a Rwandan genocide and civil war survivor.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

For more: UN Mapping Report-- https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/CD/DRC_MAPPING_REPORT_FINAL_EN.pdf

In, Amilcar Cabral and the Theory of the National Liberation Struggle, Professor Nzongola-Ntalaja writes that: “Amilcar Cabral’s contribution to understanding the success and failures of liberation movements, resides in his demonstration that national liberation struggles have two phases: the national phase and the social phase, with the latter being more crucial to its ultimate conclusion (1972: 102-110).

This analysis is of course theorized within the reality that nation states themselves have deep inherent structural implications that will come into conflict with communities of people that are excluded in its fundamental assumptions of how and for whom society should be organized.

It also is based on the reality that nation states, as advanced through European projects, were themselves developed as a direct product of imperialism and its attendant forms of colonialism (direct, indirect, neo, settler, internal).

According to Amiri Baraka in Towards Ideological Clarity, “the 18th century [a time when European nation states, driven by the old wars between tribal Europe rapidly began to solidify their existence in national entities] was, also, the time when European capitalism amassed the initial wealth it needed to bring about the unprecedented technological advances responsible for what was later called the: industrial revolution. This primitive accumulation cannot be separated from the European Slave Trade...".

Writing in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney further argues that: “throughout the 17th and 18th centuries and for most of the 19th century, the exploitation of Africa and African labor continued to be a source for the accumulation of capital to be re-invested in Western Europe. The African contribution to European capitalist growth extended over such vital sectors as shipping, insurance, [the formation of international corporations-such as but not limited to, the African Royal Company, East Indian Company, etc], capitalist agriculture, technology and the manufacture of machinery...".

The legacy of this is encapsulated in an African world left to wrestle with the contradictions inherent in sociopolitical and economic structures where the exploitation of human and natural resources is the foundational ethos and the human response is a reclamation of its humanity as developed from a critical consciousness—in the case of the African world, a critical Africana consciousness.

Today, AWNP is in conversation with veteran activist and political theorist, Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party.

In 1966, Chairman Omali Yeshitela after ripping down a racist mural from the walls of City Hall in St Petersburg, Florida, developing a political and intellectual trajectory informed by anti-colonial movements around the world and the struggle for liberation by people of African descent in the U.S., Yeshitela has dedicated his life to refining a praxis that seeks to institutionalize freedom for the African world.

In 1972, the African People’s Socialist Party was formed along with the worldwide Uhuru Movement and the African Socialist International, with branches active in the U.S., Europe, the Caribbean and on the continent of Africa.

Last year, Chair Omali, as Malcolm X did 55 years ago, traveled to London to participate in the formal debates at the Oxford Union. He was asked to argue in favor of the house embracing an ever-closer African union.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

For more: https://apspuhuru.org/

To unpack the complexities of Africana resistance, particularly its most “radical” elements—whether expressed through collective or/and individual activities and thought, it is vital to identify and map the traditions that inform and challenge their praxis. To be clear, the processes of identification and mapping is to highlight points of continuity and discontinuity, in order to understand distortions to expressed objectives, particularly if those expressed objectives are justice, equality and freedom.

Being so, let’s apply this perspective to Kwame Ture aka Stokely Carmichael.

The 1967 Dialectics of Liberation Congress held in London, proved to be an important catalyst in the praxis of Kwame Ture.

The Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation (for the Demystification of Violence) took place in London’s Roundhouse between the 15th and 30th July 1967, it was an attempt to ‘demystify human violence in all its forms, and the social systems from which it emanates, and to explore new forms of action.’

Ture (Carmichael at the time) contribution to the Dialectics of Liberation conference and elsewhere, were premised by his expressed purpose to expose the forms of oppression endemic to the institutionalized norms and practices of white, Western, or “advanced” nations. Unpacking the endemic violence inherent in racial capitalism and its fortification in Western institutions, Carmichael exposed the limits of white liberalism, which he characterizes as “sympathetic [to the cause of black struggle] in an empty sense,” missing the big picture of the institutional forms to which its adherents contribute, despite their “good intentions” (Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan Africanism: 78-79).

The importance of revisiting and deeply exploring this lecture from Kwame Ture in this period of being quote ‘woke’ unquote and the rampant and narrow postulation and self-congratulatory circles that posit that scholarship is in fact activism (i.e. write a book about history, not understanding or even unpacking the relevance of their ideas to the ‘now moment’ and in many cases not even reading the very people these scholars- activist are writing about today) is absolutely essential.

The extreme danger in such individualistic, neoliberal sensibilities are: 1) they coopt and distort the range and foresight of the ideas presented, relegating them and subsequently binding them to a period. And the way time is understood in a Western context is antagonistic and debilitating to the way ‘time’ is understood in relation to space (physical mental and spiritual) as well as the power of the ‘word’ in an Africana context (we will deal with this in another program); 2) this framing ensures that future generations betray the instructions of those who come before are urge us to create another future through substantive engagement with the past. Knowing an event happened on a certain date does not necessitate an understanding. Nor does it consolidate into a movement. In short, it does something that one of our important thinkers, Tom Porter, always reminds us of: it is the Negation of the Negation.

Moving unconscious to conscious is an intentional, protracted, collective process that requires 1) (collective) study; 2) (collective) deep thinking; 3) (collective) engagement/application; for collective 4) refinement/evolution/correction. More important it provides accountability and serves as a mechanism of self and collective critique. Study, thought, and action must always equate to collective progress.

These factors are exemplified through the praxis of Kwame Ture.

On October 12, 1983, Maurice Bishop, prime minster of Grenada and one of the founding leaders of the New Jewel Movement, was placed under house arrest at the orders of Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard (Maurice Bishop Speaks, xii-xiii).

On October 19, Maurice Bishop and five other central leaders of Grenada’s revolutionary government and the New Jewel Movement were murdered, at the orders of Deputy Minister Bernard Coard.

On October 25, thousands of U.S. Marines and Army Rangers landed in Grenada to establish a military occupation of the island and brutally reversed the far-reaching advancements that were implemented as a result of the March 13, 1979, revolution.

In less than two weeks, the Grenadian worker and farmer government established after the removal of Granada’s dictator, Eric Gairy, saw the U.S. military at the command of President Ronald Raegan, invade the island.

Notwithstanding this history of oppression, there is a clear history of resistance.

The new jewel movement was formed in 1973, as a result of the merger of two organizations that were established the previous year—the Movement for Assemblies of the People (MAP), and the Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education and Liberation (Jewel). The new organization showed its capacity to mobilize mass support through rallies swelling up to 10,000 people.

In a 1977 interview, Bishop articulated the ideological foundations of the movement stating that: “the idea of Black Power that developed in the United States and the freedom struggle of the African people in such places as Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau and unquestionably through the Cuban experience we got the chance to see scientific socialism up close” (Maurice Bishop Speaks, xii-xiii).

What must not be lost is that Maurice Bishop and Unison Whiteman are exemplars of what I called a critical Africana human rights consciousness, a praxis that evident in Africana sociopolitical and cultural practices. The praxis of their critical human rights consciousness is rooted in an African ethos and expressed through the processes of: refining and gaining international perspectives; building ways to institutionalization the movement; refining and clarifying ideological guidance; understanding the conditions of struggle as being centered on questions around human rights; developing and disseminating a counter discourse, through various multimedia platforms.

Radio Free Grenada was a nod to Radio Free Dixie, established by Mabel and Robert F Williams when they were exiled in Cuba. C. L. R. James is known to be a strong radical intellectual influence on the movement and its members.

What we will hear next, is one of the last engagements Maurice Bishop had on U.S. soil; a June 5, 1983 talk Bishop gave in New York. This is one day after he was honored speaker at the invitation of TransAfrica, held on June 4, 1983, an organization of which I, as well as AWNP’s own Mwiza Munthali, who was Director of Public Affairs worked with. The June 4 1983 TransAfrica event was filmed by Haile Gerima.

It is the intention of AWNP to bring you the voices of those from whom you would not normally get a chance to hear, as they articulate their ideas with their own words; due to the direct efforts of historical marginalization for political purpose. Some of you may have heard this before, while some of you have never even heard of Maurcie Bishop. Either way, AWNP is a platform for building, expanding, and applying ideas. As once explored by Kwame Ture, moving the unconscious to conscious.

Forward Ever, Backward Never

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!